I watched Donald Trump’s news conference yesterday (August 15, 2017) and agree with most of what he said. The only disagreement I have is that I do not believe that economic growth in itself will improve race relations. However, he is correct that it is hypocritical to take Confederate monuments down and still support monuments to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. The Left, big business, and establishment Republicans like Mitch McConnell are doing their best to turn people into rootless, homeless machines who work for the technocratic state. If history is erased except for a whitewashed history that supposedly is non-controversial, this helps produce the robot-like, echo-chamber world they desire. I have ancestors who fought on both sides in the War between the States. I am a member of Sons of Confederate Veterans. I find the removal of monuments to Robert E. Lee and others who were involved with the Confederacy to be a travesty, an act of historical vandalism fueled by corrupt “history professors” and other members of the Academic Left, the radical Left in general, and the corporate Right to destroy the heritage of an entire group of people. The sheer hypocrisy of such people is astounding. They ignore the fact that most people in the North supported slavery because it kept blacks from moving into their states. They ignore the racism of Lincoln–even most of the Abolitionists were racists. They ignore the fact that one of their most hated figures, Nathan Bedford Forrest, supported full civil rights for blacks in his old age. They ignore the fact that many of the Founding Fathers were slave owners, including those mentioned above, Washington and Jefferson. They ignore the fact that General Ulysses S. Grant owned slaves and refused to release them after the war until the Thirteenth Amendment was passed. Related to that, they ignore the fact that Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation only applied to the Confederate States, not to the other states that remained part of the United States. They pay attention to the Succession Documents of the deep South states, ignoring other motivations for war in the middle South in which states opposed Lincoln’s unjust and illegal invasion of the South. They ignore the brutal war crimes committed by the Union Army, especially but not exclusively under General Sherman. They bring up atrocities in Andersonville yet ignore greater atrocities and a higher death toll in Union POW camps. They ignore the fact that many blacks fought for the South as attested by newspapers covering the war. They ignore the stirring up of the former slaves by corrupt Northern agents during Reconstruction.

Their hypocrisy is bare for all to see, yet the elites–both Democrat and Republican–have power and use that power to suppress dissent and destroy monuments. Organizations such as the SCV and United Daughters of the Confederacy can work to buy up private land on which to put the monuments, but that will not help in places like Baltimore, where the mayor desires not only to remove the monuments in that city, but destroy them. In Durham, North Carolina, a mob destroyed a Confederate monument. These actions are fundamentally evil, and some of the people in Virginia were opposing the removal of the statues and were not part of any white supremacist group. But lumping legitimate groups together with racists such as Nazis is a favorite–if dishonest and unfair–tactic by the Left (and by Mitch McConnell).

Yesterday when I heard Mr. Trump, I felt proud to have him as President of the United States.

A loose coalition of Democrats, mainstream Republicans, and mainstream media figures are traitors against the United States of America. They are attempting a coup against the duly elected president of the United States, Donald Trump, by appealing to a concocted story of collusion between Mr. Trump and his allies and Russia to alter the results of the 2016 presidential election. With the help of Obama operatives already appointed in the federal agencies, especially the intelligence community, they have orchestrated “leaks” from unnamed sources who may or may not be real persons. I would bet that at least some of them are made up. Those in power do not like to be challenged. Like the bureaucracy of ancient Rome, the powers behind the scenes are often the most powerful figures in a nation. For the United States, that is a dangerous situation, threatening the integrity of what is left of the republic.

None of this should be a surprise. Power corrupts, and the entrenched powers in the federal bureaucracy hate Mr. Trump for challenging them. In the past, outsiders have had mixed results, with Andrew Jackson finding some success, but Jimmy Carter being caught up in battles with his own party in Congress, similar to the situation in which Mr. Trump finds himself.

In addition, anarchists, Marxists, and other radical groups have joined together in violent protests against the expression of any conservative views or of any support for Mr. Trump. They are sending a clear message that if they do not remove Mr. Trump in a bloodless coup, they will take the opposite route. Spoiled, stupid millennials have listened to aging baby boomer New Leftists and are protesting something they know not what. Blinded by public school educations and leftist propaganda from colleges and universities, they have lost the ability to think and only react like zombies. There are exceptions, but most millennials make up a generation second in destructiveness only to the spoiled baby boomers who sponsored the 1960s cultural revolution.

The only group that has kept the United States from falling into a shooting civil war have been the subset of the working classes who supported Mr. Trump. With elites trying to reverse an election through lies and innuendo and a congressional and court witch hunt, those individuals may come to believe their only option is violence.

The politicians and media elites involved in this attempted coup should be arrested and charged with treason. If convicted, they should serve prison time. Freedom of the press does not protect treason and sedition–or at least it should not. However, with both parties caught up in corruption, no one will be held responsible for this coup. Mr. Trump should fight it to the best of his ability. If this coup works, God help us all.

For those of us who believe in “American First,” the time beginning April 7, 2017 marked the time we realized that we had been hoodwinked. President Trump went back on his promise to stay out of foreign entanglements and attacked Syria, something he thought was a stupid idea in 2013. Now the situation has worsened, with John F. Kelly at Homeland Security saying that the wall between the United States and Mexico is “just a figure of speech.” Mr. Kelly is soft overall in immigration. As a Trump supporter who attended two rallies and gave $70.00 to his campaign as well as enthusiastically voting for him, I feel as I have been kicked in the gut. From some of the reaction I have seen online, others feel the same way.

Mr. Trump came across as the essence of sincerity on the campaign trail. He clearly communicated that the United States would build a literal wall between Mexico and the U. S. His supporters understood, of course, that if terrain made it the case that concrete or brick was not an option, alternative ways of controlling the border at those points would be found. Now it appears that the term “wall” was merely metaphorical. If that is so, the disastrous and uncontrolled illegal immigration will most likely continue with the Mexican pipeline gushing nearly unchecked.

Mr. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner is said to be the one encouraging Mr. Trump to “moderate” his views. Of course, Jared’s wife and Trump’s daughter Ivanka are going to have a strong influence on the President as well. This may not only involve a more internationalist approach to foreign policy and an easing off from planned immigration restrictions, but also a more liberal stance on social issues. The American public did not elect Jared Kushner as President, nor did they elect Ivanka Trump. They elected Donald Trump. Perhaps the Trump we are seeing now is the real Trump and not the person we saw on the campaign trail. I hope that is not the case, but it may be that voters have been intentionally deceived into voting from a man who does not share their values. If that is the case, not only has Mr. Trump effectively guaranteed he will lose in 2020, the Republicans could suffer a devastating electoral defeat in the 2018 mid term elections. Voters do not appreciate betrayal.

Now Mr. Trump did keep his word on one big issue: the Supreme Court. That would have been enough by itself to guarantee my vote for Mr. Trump. However, I feel now as if I de facto voted for Marco Rubio. Mr. Trump, as he is now behaving, is the new Rubio. On foreign policy, he is becoming increasingly indistinguishable from Hillary Clinton. When it comes to which party is in power in the form of the president, the situation has become “six of one, heal-dozen of the other.” Or, as the late George Wallace used to say, “There’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the two parties.”

There is no feeling worse than realizing that one has been betrayed—that the person in whom you trusted has lied to you and that “you have been had.” This is how I feel now that Donald Trump has betrayed the people who voted for him in part because he promised to keep the United States out of foreign conflicts. Mr. Trump’s missile attack on a Syrian air force base marks the day that Mr. Trump officially joined the swamp. Without waiting for an investigation to determine whether Syria is the culprit of the attack, Mr. Trump, apparently moved by the photo of dead children and babies and by his daughter, Ivanka’s, understandable emotional reaction to the photos, let his emotions overpower his reason. This, in addition to his Neoconservative and Internationalist advisors in foreign policy, moved him to a disastrous decision. He did not stop to consider why Mr. Assad, near victory in the Syrian civil war, would throw that away with a stupid and militarily useless attack on civilians. The rebels themselves are known to have chemical weapons, and they have used them before to provoke the West by blaming the Syrian government, which discarded its chemical weapons years ago. There are other interested parties, such as Israel, who also have access to chemical weapons and who could have assisted in a false flag attack. Without a full investigation, we do not really know.

Corporate interests in the United States, the military-industrial complex, lust for war profits. Mr. Trump is a man of the corporation, and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is the representative of the “moderate,” corporate wing of both political parties, and he now has the president’s ear. Mr. Trump is pushing aside his conservative advisors such as Mr. Bannon and Mr. Priebus. He is no longer his own man, trying to drain the swamp; he is merely another stooge of the military-industrial complex, no different from Mrs. Clinton. He has become part of the swamp, part of the problem rather than part of the solution. Worst of all, he has betrayed his strongest supporters and revealed himself to lack the virtue of integrity. In addition, his impulsiveness is frightening since he controls the nuclear button. Voters who supported Mr. Trump instead of Mrs. Clinton to avoid World War III may end up in a devastated world due to a man who refused to let his reason control his passions. To those who say the attack was a one-time thing, consider that the Secretary of State said that the United States is now committed to regime change in Syria, the very kind of thing Mr. Trump condemned in his campaign for president. All that will result is an Islamic state filled with the dead bodies of Christians and Alawites. Mr. Trump will have their blood on his hands.

There are more disturbing trends as well. The nepotism that has characterized the Trump Administration is worsening with the growing influence of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump. Ivanka recently had a secret meeting with Planned Parenthood, and her liberal views on abortion and other social issues are well-known. Will this mean a shift in Mr. Trump’s policies on social issues, betraying his strongest supporters once again? This couple have been a continual leftward influence on Mr. Trump, and right now it appears they will win the ideological battle at the White House. Once again, conservatives are betrayed by a Republican president. Once again, the swamp only grows deeper.

Today I will finish removing the Trump/Pence sticker from the back of my truck—a sad task, but now a necessary one.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling on Mr. Trump’s executive order on immigration will be going to the U. S. Supreme Court. The Supreme Court has claimed, ever since Chief Justice John Marshall’s Marbury v. Madison ruling of 1803, that it is the final arbiter on the constitutionality of a given law. This was, in effect, an illegal seizure of power by the judicial branch of the government from the legislative branch. Thomas Jefferson feared that such a power-play would happen and thus was skeptical of the very existence of a supreme court. He suggested that the Court should play an advisory role on the constitutionality of laws rather than a coercive role. Yet critics may ask, “How can this practically work?” Below, I offer a suggestion.

Suppose there is a question concerning the constitutionality of a law passed by the U. S. Congress or by a state legislature, and the case reaches the Supreme Court. Suppose the court rules the law constitutional. Then it would remain law without further review. But if the court rules, that in the opinion of the majority, it is unconstitutional, then the law would be sent back to the legislative body that passed it for reconsideration based on possible unconstitutionality. If, after such reconsideration, the legislative body decides to rescind the law then the law is repealed. But if, after further review, the legislative body affirms the constitutionality of the law, then it remains law. In that way, the Supreme Court’s ruling is taken seriously, but remains only advisory. A flowchart is below:

The news media is in fits over Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential election, and it is good that some of them are admitting that they misread the pulse of the American people. I grew up in a working class background, and though I am in academia, many of the people I know are rural working class people. They are angry at the government for ignoring their values, mocking their religion, interfering with religious freedom, negotiating trade deals that outsource jobs, and political correctness. The media did not understand why people, including many women, voted for Mr. Trump despite his crude locker room talk that was broadcast to the world. What they missed was that many “ordinary folk” are so sick of people being condemned for every small breach of political correctness and being labeled “racist,” “sexist,” “homophobic,” and other “ists,” that they found Mr. Trump’s crudeness to be a big middle finger extended to the politically correct establishment. They may not have approved of Mr. Trump’s actions, but in a world in which people are called out for “microaggression,” Trump’s “macroaggression” was, to his supporters, refreshing. The establishment does not realize this—that people can disapprove of a man’s speech and still overlook it. There were rough people in my extended family who said many wrong and inappropriate things, but we could still say, “That’s just Uncle Jim.” In a similar way Trump’s supporters hear him speak off the cuff or see videos of his poor behavior in the past and say, “Oh, that just ‘ole Donald Trump” and then vote for him.

Mr. Trump represents, to many of the vulgi populi, someone who is one of them despite being a billionaire. Alienated from the establishment culture, they find in Mr. Trump a champion who will stand up to a government that they believe screws them in every way. Mr. Trump did not mock their religion as Mrs. Clinton and her staff (and in a previous campaign, Mr. Obama) mocked them. Many common people see the ruling class as looking down on them, and right or wrong, they see Mr. Trump as being one with them, the people. Mr. Trump is a populist who represents an historic reversal of the policies that have been destructive to both Middle American values and the economy.

A few commentators, such as Pat Buchanan, correctly read the shift in American values against free trade and for a more restrained foreign policy—and the latter is a major shift for Southern voters. In the South, voters have typically been militaristic, supporting every U. S. military intervention in the world. Now they have shifted to a view I hear often in gatherings of the common people, that “We should stay out of that mess,” or “We should mind our own business and take care of things over here.” This move against warmongering is one I welcome, and the vote in this election is, in part, a repudiation of Mrs. Clinton’s militaristic wing of the Democratic Party.

As someone who did not fall prey to the academy’s emphasis on “multiculturalism” and “globalism,” I welcome Mr. Trump’s ideas. Like many rural people, I feel a connection with family and soil—to concrete reality, not to bloodless abstractions. I voted for Donald Trump and have no regrets. I wish him well as the country’s forty-fifth president.

Suppose you are in third grade and a much bigger kid beats you up regularly, steals your lunch money, and otherwise makes your life miserable. This happens every school day and gets to the point that you dread going to school. One day another kid comes to you and says, “I’m tired of that big kid beating up on you. Next time I see him I’m going to beat him up.” You find that hard to believe; the boy has never helped you before and never seemed to care for anybody but himself. But the next time the bully attacks you, the other boy jumps in and beats the bully up. You trust the boy who helped you, and now you will do anything to help him. A year later, when he runs for homeroom president, you are his biggest supporter.

Today many people in the United States feel bullied. Some feel bullied by the bankers and investment firm CEOs that helped create the 2008 crash that left millions of people without jobs. Others are Evangelical Christians who feel beaten down and silenced by politically correct bullying by both the Left and Right. Others who may not be Evangelical Christians are still tired of so many people getting offended at anything a person says and using that offense to bully someone out of a job, often ruining the person’s career. It seems that speaking itself will become a crime one day.

Then Donald Trump walks into the room. He is crude, he is crass, and he has no regard for what he says nor how much he offends others. He is definitely not politically correct, something protesters at his rallies understand, which is one reason they hate him. For the non-elites, the common people who feel bullied, Trump comes across as a savior. “If Trump were in, he wouldn’t let any of these jerks intimidate him. He’d just tell political correctness to go to hell.” Trump comes across to many people as the rescuer, just like the rescuer of the bullied boy in the story. Thus Trump’s supporters will be loyal to him and are willing to do anything they can to help him get elected.

I voted for Ted Cruz because I am not sure Mr. Trump is stating his true convictions–he seems to be saying what people want to hear in order to get elected. However, “I’m mad as hell” with political correctness myself, and understand the appeal of Mr. Trump. If he gets the Republican nomination, I will probably vote for him in the general election. It is risky, and I would vote with trepidation, but like many people, I am sick and tired of being intimidated by elites who try to silence speech with which they disagree. If Mr. Trump can put a dent in that trend, that, at least, would be a good thing.

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